Not Enough Time in a Day

The week before tech weekend, the precursor to hell. Yes the week before the show opens can be hell because of tech but I often think that the week before that is more of a hell for the actors.

For the past seven days, we have been trying to be off book. That hasn’t really happened. I feel terrible because I don’t know my lines. I’m not the best at time management I suppose, and I’ve been staying up for too many hours after rehearsal to learn the lines. On Tuesday we went through act one again off book, it was better but not where the director wanted it. It didn’t help that we are missing one of our actors. We have yet to have a rehearsal with all of our actors are there. The director says that we are really only going to get one or two run-throughs with all the actors. That’s very scary. Not everybody knows the blocking. I myself am still having trouble remembering where everything is. There are so many different places that I have to be.

The fun parts of rehearsal that have happened this week are the dance rehearsal. I love dancing, and it’s so much fun to learn a new type of dance. I can understand why people get frustrated, because some of the dances or complicated, but I just love it. The tricky part is that I have to speak my lines to my partner while we dance. This means that I have to find points in the dance that I am facing the audience so that they can hear what I’m actually saying. We got to a point that we could run the dance with only a few mess-ups. Then once I added my lines, everything started to get a little screwy. Thursday rolled around and I started to freak out. We were supposed to have act two off book. I knew that was not going to happen. Before rehearsal that day, I met with the actor who played my counterpart. We spent two hours working on lines. It was scary. We got to rehearsal and started the act.

Right off the bat we had to start calling lines. About 15 minutes in, our director told us that we might as will get our books so that the rehearsal could be beneficial and not just torture. I felt bad because I didn’t want to disappoint the director. I want her to see that I can be a responsible actor and learn my lines. I am a responsible person I just don’t know my lines. I guess I could make myself feel a little better to realize that everyone else in the cast is at the same place that I am. We all are struggling to learn our lines. People in that time, spoke very differently, almost a completely different language. In addition, we have to add dialect on top of it, which sometimes that can make a memorization harder. I know that we could pull it off though. We’re all really committed to this show and really want to make it work.

I personally have learned that I need to manage my time better and focus on the parts that are a priority. In my case that will be learning my lines and doing my homework. I will just have to tell everybody that for the next two weeks I am practically married to the show.